Douglas Carswell

Douglas Carswell was first elected to Parliament in 2005 by a slender 920 votes. He was returned as MP for Clacton in 2010 with a 12,000 majority. He is the author of The End of Politics and the Birth of iDemocracy and believes that the internet is making the world a vastly better place.

If we can't trust politicians, we shouldn't trust so-called 'experts' either

Of course we need politicians. How else are we to decide public policy?

Actually, if the current mood of anti politics gets much worse, I fear some folk might begin to offer some unsavoury answers.

“Leave it to the experts.” “The professionals should just be allowed to get on with it.” These are the kind of phrases we hear with increasing frequency. As confidence in those we elect falls further, the idea that public policy decisions should be taken for us by a technocratic elite begins to look ever more attractive.

How else might we decide public policy? It is only a matter of time before someone somewhere starts to suggest that we leave everything to experts.

From setting interest rates to decommissioning nuclear reactors, public policy choices are increasingly left to independent experts. Yet “independent” really means people who are given the job by appointment, not elected by the rest of us.

In a reversal of several centuries of democratic development, we have now reached a stage where being elected has almost become a disqualification for deciding things.

Are “experts” any better than those we elect? The Financial Services Authority, on whose watch the banks went bust, was full of independent experts. As was the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, which set interest rates recklessly low for so long.

Leaving the experts and professionals to get on with it, without accountability, produced the Mid Staffs disaster.

If we cannot trust those we elect, we should not trust “experts” that we don’t. The answer, instead, is to put more faith in ourselves.

Lots of clever people have woken up the idea that the internet is changing politics. And it is. The internet is opening up the political process, allowing anyone to create their own distinctive brand and identify. It is allowing voters and ideas to be aggregated in all sorts of new ways.

Yet the internet is doing something much more profound. Many of the things we regard as public policy decisions aren’t going to remain that way for much longer.

Instead of one-size-fits-all public services handed to us by politicians, we are about to enter a world where public service provision can be tailor made for each individual member of the public. A personalised curriculum for your child. A health care programme that meets the needs of your family. Medical records as confidential, yet portable, as your online bank records.

Much of what we presume sits within the public sphere, we will start to regard as personal to us. Instead of exercising choice over what public services we get through a ballot every four or five years, people will have a direct and immediate say as to what they get, all the time.

Appalled at the idea of self-selection? I suspect that the internet is making the idea of self-selection a cultural norm in a way that few inside SW1 have understood.

Of course, we are still going to need democratically elected politicians. But they will become far more directly answerable to us for what they decide – and we will expect them to decide only the things we cannot decide for ourselves.